Forward Looking Ones of Russian America

August, 2012

From August 6th to 9th , the Russian TV channel "Kultura” (Culture) provides air to rare guests. The documentary series "Russian America", which includes four films, tells about the figures of Russian culture living in the United States. The heroes of the cycle are two artists, Ilya Kabakov and Grisha Bruskin, and two culturologists, Solomon Volkov and Alexander Genis.

The director of the series, Nina Zaretskaya, is a philologist by education, lives and works in Moscow and New York. She is a producer, TV journalist, founder and director of Art Media Center “TV Gallery”, which she founded in 1991. She has released over one hundred television programs, documentaries and video programs on contemporary art. She took part in exhibition projects and festivals in the USA, Russia, Spain, Germany, Croatia, Canada and other countries.

Oleg Sulkin, the Voice of America correspondent, spoke with Nina Zaretskaya. <…>

O.S: How did you choose these characters? And how would you define the genre: film-portrait, film-conversation, film-panegyric?

N.Z: Not a panegyric, that's for sure, I never do panegyrics. These are film-researches. My ideas about a specific person and, at the same time, this person himself, his portrait, well, like in painting.

O.S: How do the intellectuals of Russian America differ from their colleagues in Russia?

N.Z: Joseph Brodsky said very well about this, who noticed that we are sitting here in America, on the top of a hill and we can see both of its slopes. These people feed on both Russian and American culture, and give themselves to both Russian and American culture. Their vision is more voluminous, international. By the way, this statement by Brodsky is quoted by one of my heroes, a cultural researcher Solomon Volkov.

O.S: You consider this feature positive, but the literary critic Natalya Ivanova reproaches Solomon Volkov for the strangeness of the style, which she ironically calls "a mixture of Russian and International." In general, in Russia, traditionally, since the time of Alexander Herzen, people treat those who "see both slopes" with a certain skepticism. Do you touch on this aspect?

N.Z: Unfortunately, no. The timing of films would not allow this. 26 minutes is not enough time to delve deeper into different side branches of the topic. And then I have a positive attitude to the "hill". All these characters not only did not lose from life in America, but also gained. Yes, emigration can be a terrible trauma, but a creative person very often finds a constructive way out. I am not sure that Brodsky, for all his genius, would have received the Nobel Prize if he had stayed in Russia and had not started writing in English. <…>

Oleg Sulkin for the Voice of America

Full text – on the Russian version of the site